Welcome to the fifth theme of the BlueChampions blog. May be I don’t have any moral ground to talk about Anelka’s perfect 10 anymore! So how do you like this ‘BC-Lite’ theme? While this is a cosmetic change, the idea behind the change is more medicinal.

The previous theme made the blog heavier which started showing up in loading time and culminated in a near disaster. This time around, I’ve chosen a very light theme, which is based more on text and CSS than on images and the like. As I was browsing through for a theme to replace the ‘revolution’ theme, I just collated all those complaints you had made about that theme in attempt to find a theme that can address those.

So, what’s new with ‘BC-Lite’? The most obvious thing is the ‘black-and-whiteness’ of the theme as opposed to the previous one, which looked like somebody spilt the blue paint on my monitor. Am I planning to modify this to make this as blue as possible? No. I feel this is best left as it is. I tried playing around but the composition and balance got screwed up big time. Believe me, you’d start liking this colour scheme too.

Despite being a colourful and bright theme, the earlier theme was kind of a failure when it came to navigation. The layout probably was not very user-friendly and it must have been confusing at times, I admit. The best feature of the new ‘BC-Lite’ theme happens to navigation. Now I need to be more disciplined in categorising and tagging the posts because the navigation in this theme is based on categories and sub-categories. For instance, the match preview of the Olympiacos vs Chelsea match, would come under category ‘Matches’ and sub-category ‘Champions League’. The posts are also neatly organised in a drop down menu based on the categorisation. If you want to see all the posts related to the FA Cup, it is now possible. I’ve taken pains to assign categories to posts that did not have proper classification, so that it shows up when you look for the posts under that category. Still I could go back only upto Nov 2007, anything before may not carry the right classification.

The latest post always appears in black background in the home page. That’s just to attract some attention which is good. Below that you’ll see the latest 10 posts irrespective of which category it belongs to. Under this main category you find three boxes – one each for Debates, Match Topics and News Stories, just like the previous theme. The slick thing about this simple theme is the side bar that is powered by Ajax (not the Dutch club) technology. Just hover over the tab names to experience the pleasure of Ajax.

As always, please cast your vote in the opinion poll in the side bar but only after using this theme for a day or two and no knee jerk reactions please.

You’ll soon realise that this theme just means business. Very powerful and ‘tactically’ sound. Overall, it does give some kind of ‘serious look’ to the blog which is fine. We are having some real, intense, intellectual discussions out here, don’t we?